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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Now that I am almost done painting what seems like half of
our house, I can get down to business and get back to what I really love, which
is expose my inner thoughts to random strangers and my mom on the internet.

And now you know that I am not much of a multi-tasker.

I’d post pictures of my handiwork, but all the rooms I
painted in our home the last four weeks were redone in shades of gray and
white, which is not very interesting.I
might have posted them if I had chosen more attention-grabbing colors, which
was what I decided to cover in the first place.That would have been more interesting, if you think dings, strangely
colored smudges, and black slashes on walls and ceilings (ceilings?) painted
with jungle animals, goldfish bubbles, and large pastel polka dots are more
interesting than gray and white walls.Seriously.It was like a game of “what
do you think THAT mark is from” combined with “I can’t BELIEVE that I was so
stupid to paint all this crap in the first place” all up in here.

Plus, who cares what a freshly painted room looks like in
someone else’s house.I am the only one
who really appreciates the transformation, evidenced by the many times over the
past month I have found myself standing quietly in a newly painted room, admiring
the smooth, unmarked walls and letting them soothe me into a trance-like state.

Or maybe it’s just the paint fumes.

In any case, it’s almost finished and I am looking forward
to the new month beginning without a paintbrush in my hand.In all, it wasn’t such a bad way to spend
January, a month which I hate mostly because of the post-holiday let-down, the
terrible weather in our part of the world, and the general feeling of jerkiness
that January seems to possess.

Friday, January 25, 2013

When I was younger, I’d scoff at regret as if it were a
prudish school marm trying to keep me down.I regretted nothing.Those
situations and behaviors that, when reflected upon, caused a physical and
emotional wincing, were placed in the Life Experiences category as quick as a
flinch.Back then, I told myself that
regret was a weakness; own up to your past behaviors, but be sure to
rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.I
was young; I didn’t know better; I was influenced; I was having fun.

These days, I feel regret.I dwell in regret just long enough to tsk tsk
myself and vow to do better.I tell
myself to learn from mistakes; don’t file them away, only to be repeated
tomorrow.

I do much better now than I did then,
but there are some mistakes that can’t be improved upon.Sometimes, you get a moment to do the right
thing, and if you don’t take it, it is lost forever.

It’s here that I reflect on my children, and my decisions on
how to parent them.I am not a perfect
parent; there is certainly a lot of square footage for me to improve upon.My children are imperfect individuals, and
they reflect me perfectly.We are all
just a bit inconsistent, unloving, and critical, and every parenting manual and
parenting professional out there preaches the direct opposite.

The problem with parenting and regret is that children grow
so fast that you often don’t get another chance to do it over.You find yourself trying to improve upon a
mistake that you wish you hadn’t made.The way back to the road is so difficult that you wish you’d have just
followed the directions in the first place and not okayed the shortcuts that
put you off the path so obviously.

It’s no secret that I am a reluctant electronics user.It is ever so apparent that I am in the
minority.I have been swept along in the
personal electronics craze with everyone else, and have thus far been standing
on the edge of this current screaming digital age with alternating disdain and indifference.I possess no state-of-the-art electronic
devices.I conceded to receiving a
Kindle as a gift, thinking it would drive me to read more.I haven’t touched it in weeks.

When my kids were old enough not to break everything they
touched, they were given personal electronics devices despite my gut feelings
that they were not old enough to take adequate responsibility for them.Over the next few years, they have been given
other devices that are a source of grief and stress in our household.Despite usage limits, we remind our children daily
to end their screen sessions, to which we are more often than not countered
with fits of anger, tears, and stalling techniques.“One more minute” turns into five, then ten,
then twenty.It is the most common form
of Disrespect in my house.

The devices that were so shiny in the box have turned into
grimy objects that litter our home.Sometimes
they have not worked correctly for days, and only when I take the time to help
my children delete apps they no longer use, update the ones they do, and clean
them up will they snatch them away from me only to be clogged with more
unusable apps and worthless pictures.They are not old enough to be responsible for a pocket-sized device that
each cost upwards of at least two hundred dollars.Two hundred dollars is still a lot of money
in our house.

Charge your iPad.Plug
in the computer.Turn off your
mouse.These sayings have become a mantra
that I have adopted as a way to instill responsibility in my children about
their belongings.I should be telling
them to go outside, read a book, play a game together.They should not be worried about where their
chargers are.

My son tells me that most of his school friends have
cellphones.My son is still a child: he
is 11 years old.I do not understand why
he would have to call or text anyone, including me, from school during the
day.He is supervised by adults at
school, adults whom he can talk to if he needs to contact me.They need to know if there is a problem at
school.If he is contacting me from his
pocket in the hallways at school, no one knows but him and me that there is a
problem.The adults at school should
know that there is a problem, and in my opinion they should know about it first.

My son also tells me that some kids look at the types of websites
on their phones that I don’t even look at on my computer.We can’t look at those websites on our electronic
devices because we have set parental controls not to.My husband would be fired from his job if he
looked at them on his work computer.

I am not naive.I know
that when given the chance, like I had when I was little and got an eyeful of a
discarded Playboy magazine, my son will experience these things.I know he has curiosity about these
things.I am not into sheltering my
children from the world; they live in it.

But they are not old enough for all of the things that
electronic devices bring, starting with the real care that a teeny computer
requires.We know this from
experience.I have also seen enough child-owned
cellphones with cracked screens to know that my children are not the only ones
who are too young to know how to be responsible for them.I know they are not old enough to view porn
and the kinds of inappropriate things that make me squirm when I think of my
children being exposed to them.They are
not 18 years old; they are 9 and 11.

I do not have the answers about how to parent in this age of
electronics.All I know is what my gut
tells me, and I wish that we had held off on giving them their own devices to manage until they were
older.That time will never be returned
to me, or to them.I regret that, but
never so much as when we are battling over daily screen time, or taking the
time to nurse a tearful child’s iPod back to health.Our children are children; they are innocent.I regret this loss in them that I believe is
occurring earlier than it had to, but most of all, I regret that I didn’t put
my foot down when I had the chance.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

It was breakfast time, so I pulled up to the drive thru
window at McDonald’s and placed my order.I don’t visit this particular establishment often, but I was out, and wanted
some more coffee, and darn it, I deserved a break today.

After ordering, I pulled up to Window 1 to pay for my
food.The sliding window opened, and I
was greeted by a cheerful man’s gap-toothed smile.It was 9:00 on a frigid morning, and the wind
blew in his face as he reached his Golden Arches-emblazoned gloved hand out to
receive my money.How can I get my hands
on a pair of those gloves without actually working here, I wondered.The fingerless look is really in right now,
and the “M” design has always been one of my favorites.

“How are you today?” I asked the man as I forked over some
cash, mostly in pennies and nickels that I keep on the floor of my car.

“Cold!”he
replied.“Heh heh heh!”

“Seriously,” I answered, feigning disgust.I glanced at my car thermometer which rudely
announced an outside temperature of 14.I
gave it the finger and said, “It’s only fourteen out right now.”

McDonald’s drive-thru looked me straight in the eye and
said, “Well, you couldn’t be at my house in the summer, then.I like my indoor temperature at THIRTY-EIGHT
during the summer months.My
air-conditioning works great, and my wife hates it.I have to keep it at around fifty just so I
don’t freeze her out!HEH HEH HEH HEH
HEH HEH HEH!

“Whoa,” I said.“Are
you part snowman?Is Frosty your Dad?Did you come from the North Pole?Is your name Jack Frost?”

Actually, I gave him none of those responses.I thought of those, and a hundred more, about
five minutes after I gave him one more “ha ha,” said thanks for the change, and
retrieved my food from the next drive-thru worker who practically threw it
through the window as the arctic air threatened to turn her eyeballs into
snowballs.

I would have loved to sit there with that guy all day long
and asked him about his vacation homes on the polar icecaps and if he
keeps penguins in the refrigerator.He was friendly, and I love a good story, even if it may not be 100%
true.Then again, it could be, although
I question a reality that allows a McDonald’s employee to afford an electric
bill that manages an indoor temp of 38 during our 90-plus degree summers.

On another note, not much compares with the deliciousness of
a freshly-made McDonald’s sausage biscuit.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

In college I sat in a huge auditorium during an introductory
psychology class with three hundred other equally clueless students. The outrageously
leonine and tweedy prof stood there, triumphantly tenured, peered at us over his
half-spectacles through the bushiest eyebrows I had ever seen and have ever
seen since, and in a slurred and probably drunken voice declared: “Forget what you’ve
been told.There are such things as dumb questions.Always think before you ask.”

I was floored, and I have never forgotten that lesson.I have asked countless questions in my
lifetime, and through the filter of the lie that we have been told as children “there
is no such thing as a dumb question,” we grow up learning that it is okay to
ask anything and that no one will think you ridiculous for asking. We are told that the spirit of the questioning overrides any
ignorance about the topic at hand, because it shows a level of humility
and readiness to be taught that any rational person welcomes in another human
being.It’s refreshing.

But there is a line.When you are an adult, it is okay to ask questions unless they are dumb
ones.When you are an adult, you must
hold back.You must know which questions
are dumb and refrain from asking them.You cannot fire questions at people and expect them to always respond
positively to your line of questioning, unless they hold the key to any and all
information on a subject that you are interested in learning. If you don’t think
before you ask, and you ask a lot of dumb questions, you will annoy people.

You’re welcome.

I love my husband.I’m his wife, and as a wife you’re supposed to say that, or else people
look at you with pity in their eyes and silently high five themselves for truly
loving their husbands while you are judged for obviously struggling in your
marriage, because there is an unwritten rule that even though marriage is the
hardest relationship in the entire universe, you are supposed to act like it is
both easy AND breezy.

Which it isn’t, OK?I
don’t care if you’re Hugh Jackman’s wife and you are so lucky to be married to him
that you spend every day smiling at yourself in the mirror for obviously
winning the husband jackpot.

So anyway, I love my husband.BUT.

He never learned the ‘Think before you ask’ lesson I did in
college.He frequently asks questions as
a means of conversation.And many of
his questions are dumb ones. I mean, it's obvious that he didn't put any time into the thoughts behind these questions. Here are a
few that occurred recently:

(My husband): What are
you doing? I am sitting at the
computer, paying bills.My answer:Right now I am catching up on writing fan
mail to myself and doing my hourly Kegel count.I just sent $10,000 to this businessman in Nigeria who promised me $100,000
in diamonds after the check clears.I
figured you wouldn’t mind.

Is that hairspray? Asked as he ‘keeps me company’ while I get
ready after a shower.It’s a little
weird that he watches me dry off all the parts of my body that I wish
didn’t exist, but that's his nightmare. When he asks if I am spraying hairspray on my body out of a
fragrance bottle, I get a little testy.My answer: Yes.I am spraying
hairspray all over myself before I put my clothes on.It’s supposed to be good for your skin.And your eyes.Would you like to try? Open wide.

What are you thinking
about having for dinner?Asked during
hour 8 of a 10-hour day that I spent with our daughter at a mildly tortuous and lengthy academic tournament,
while he was at home most of the day.My
answer (after taking some deep breaths and silently thanking God that there were
no sharp objects in my hands):Gee, I
don’t know.I was thinking about going
home and drinking a bottle of wine.Maybe I’ll chase it with some tequila shots if I’m still hungry afterwards.If you and the kids don’t want
that, then you are on your own.

What are your plans
for tonight?Asked on a Friday at 5
pm, after I’ve completed a solid week of manual work done inside the house.I am sweaty, exhausted, and irritable.My answer:None.I have no energy to answer
such a dumb question.I instead turn on the
water in the shower as hot as I can stand, stand under the stream, and weep as I think that Hugh Jackman probably gives his wife daily footrubs.

What are you making?Asked as I stand at the kitchen counter, a
huge bowl of chopped-up lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, and green peppers in front
of me.I am chopping up a red pepper to
add to the bowl.My answer:I’m making hot dogs.Do you want one?

What do the kids want to do? Asked as the kids stand right there in front of both of us. My answer: Kids! Your father wants to know: What do you want to do? Then: You know, the kids can hear as well as respond intelligently. Someday you must learn to speak to them directly.

(Holding up a movie) Do
you want to watch this movie? I am
sitting with a book, taking pleasure in some peace and quiet. My
answer: Not really.Do you want to rent another one?My answer: (realizing that my first answer was the wrong one) OK.Which movie
do you want to see?My answer:I don’t care.Do you want to see (movie A)?Do you want to see (movie B)?Do you want to see (movie C)?I don’t care.Please pick one. Which movie were
you thinking about getting?I wasn’t.YOU ASKED ME IF I’D LIKE TO WATCH A
MOVIE.PICK ONE
FORTHELOVEOFEVERYTHINGTHATISHOLY!!!!!OK.But which one were you thinking?

It goes on forever, folks.It has become kind of a joke, if jokes were intended to drive the
recipient to the edge of sanity.The
bright spot is that he gives me plenty of opportunities to practice my snark.

The dark spot is that for him, there is still no such thing
as a dumb question.

Monday, January 14, 2013

I have two boys in my family: my husband and my son.As numbers go, this isn’t too bad.They are not too hard to handle, and there
are two girls in the house too, so I am not often outnumbered.Both of my boys are pretty reasonable
individuals. My husband, despite his addiction to asking questions, is an emotionally
even-Steven who hardly ever gets ruffled unless things don’t go perfectly for
him, which they usually do, because he does most everything perfectly.

My son is also pretty reasonable, even as an 11-year-old,
except for the times when his emotional state rises and falls in rapid fire succession and
we all get a front-row seat to the one-man show I like to call Rage and Crying.This can happen at any time, like in the
middle of a spirited discussion with his sister about how she stores her Barbie
dolls’ clothing, or like when I ask him to turn off his computer when he still
has four minutes of screen time left.

What can be hard to handle, however, is when both boys are
home with me at the same time, and the other girl is not here to run
interference.Especially if the boys
didn’t really plan on being at home in the first place, but they are due to
plans falling through or other things like illness or broken down cars, which
is what is happening today.Right now.

The boys in my house are like dogs: they require constant
companionship, recognition, and reward.They are needier than newborns, these boys.They need a job to do, and if they did not
plan to be here on an extended basis but are because of uncontrollable outside events,
I am relied upon to occupy them.

And that is exhausting. And I am kind of lazy to boot, so I don’t
enjoy the extra work it takes to entertain a couple of men who don’t know how
to put their time in peacefully and quietly at home and instead spend their
unoccupied time wandering around aimlessly and getting into my business.Especially when I’m also not feeling
well.I mean, I’m already kind of
resenting the fact that no one around here would eat anything but potato chip
crumbs and 100-calorie snack packs unless I lovingly prepared vats of homemade
family chow that they still turn up their noses at in favor of the boxes of Little
Debbies I keep on hand for when I am jonesing for a swiss roll the kids’
lunch boxes.

So what is an overworked, mildly ill mom to do?

So far, all I have come up with is to hide in the TV room, watch
taped awards show ceremonies and HBO on demand, blog a little, and ride
the day out.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

My daughter wanted a bedroom re-do, so I helped her decide
how to transform her room into one that more matches her style now and less
like when she was three.

This week seemed like one as good as any to start on the
transformation, and as there are several rooms in our home that need freshening,
I made the decision to power through the rest of them when hers was finished.We can’t afford to hire professional painters for
the work, and my husband works all day and all night seemingly, so the chore
falls squarely on my shoulders.It’s a
lesson in home ownership: painting must be done on a regular basis and you will
most likely have to do it yourself.

If someone would have told me that before I signed a
mortgage, I would have said no thanks.Renting is where it's at.

I hate painting.It’s
messy, it’s smelly, I’m terrible at it, and it never seems to end.When the walls are finished, you may as well
do the trim.And the doors.Outlet covers off, outlet covers on.Furniture moves around to make room for the
displaced items in a to-be painted room until everyone is uncomfortable and I
can’t find anything.

I got my supplies, cried a little, turned on my favorite
Pandora radio station, took a deep breath, and steeled myself for daily
self-inflicted torture, at least for a couple of weeks.

Painting by yourself is a lonely, isolating chore.It’s mindless, and unlike other mindless and
lonely household tasks like cleaning or laundry, with painting you’re confined
to one room until it is finished and that makes me sad, because I don’t have
freedom to quit or walk around.I’m a
slave to the paint can and the brushes and rollers that will surely harden and
be ruined if I take a half a day or week or month break. You can do that with
cleaning and laundry.

Which I don’t but you can if you don’t mind living in filth
and wearing dirty clothes.

Maybe the only thing I like about painting is having all
that time to think.I can pass an hour
or two staring out the window thinking about life and the world, but that feels
a little indulgent.At least if I’m
painting I’m being productive.Then I
thought I could make it more productive by jotting down some of my thoughts while
I was painting today; maybe I would have an interesting insight or find an
important solution or maybe even discover a million-dollar idea.

What I found is that painting is in fact a soul-sucking chore,
because time spent painting produces very little valuable insight.

But at least I got a blog post about it.Enjoy my innermost thoughts from a day of
paining.

(That was an unintended typo.But I’m keeping it.)

I hate painting.I want to cry.At least I thought to pull my hair back this
time.No white primer in my hair for
weeks this time.

Crap.Paint in my hair.

I wonder what my old
dance teacher/elementary school boyfriend/that girl I hung out with who stole
a bottle of champagne on that cruise back in the 80s/that old dude who flipped
me off on the road in front of the kids is doing right now.

(Mumford and Sons song playing) I love Mumford and Sons.I
wonder if they’re coming to this area.I
need to remember to Google it.I’ll go
ahead and add that to my “things I want to Google” list that is already a mile
long.

Oooh, Coldplay too.They never get old.I wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow ever painted the
rooms in her house?She probably never
had to paint anything, unless it’s for cultivating a latent artistic talent or
for a movie role.She has time to do
that, do nothing but cultivate her own talents.Probably she doesn’t even know how to paint a wall.

I bet if she did,
she’d be better than me at it.

Great.Paint on the underside of the dropcloth.How does that happen?

At least I have more
life experience than Gwyneth Paltrow.

Then again, I never
won an Oscar.I guess winning an Oscar
trumps painting a room on the life experience continuum any day.I probably could, though.If I was an actor.Or at least wasn’t terrified of performing in
front of people.I could win an Oscar
for a screenplay.Are screenplay Oscars
considered less important than acting Oscars? Certainly they’re more important
than those scientific Oscars that have a separate ceremony hosted by whatever starlet
is famous right now and never will be again ever.

Actually that Oscar
party is probably the wildest of all Oscar parties.Those scientific people are crazy partiers,
just like in in Revenge of the Nerds or that 1980’s Val Kilmer movie, what was it called? (Real Genius.)

I wonder if Gwyneth
Paltrow ever accidentally read my blog while cruising through Blogger late at
night?

If I didn’t have paint
all over my hands/face/legs/butt/arms I would totally give Pandora a huge
thumbs down for this song.Am I in
Braveheart? Terrible. (It was Breath
of Life by Florence and the Machine)

Well, I guess I know
that I’ll never get through an entire Florence and Machine concert.

Wow.This paint really stinks.I feel like I’ve been huffing.Do kids still do that?My brain hurts.Wonder how many brain cells I’ll kill in the
next few weeks.

Whose idea was it to
put all these stupid glow in the dark stars on the ceiling?Bad idea.Bad, bad idea.

I wonder if the people
in Lowe’s really know what they’re doing.This primer clearly is not going to cover up all those huge polka dots I
painted that were a worse idea than the glow stars.

The next person in
this house that wants any color on their walls other than white or cream gets a
neck punch.

Lowe’s employees probably
hire people to do all their painting for them.DIY diehards are obviously people who I can’t relate to.

Oops.I should only buy paint that matches the
carpet.

I wonder what the percent
likelihood is that the glop of paint that falls from the brush to the floor
will end up on the carpet, in that tiny eighth-inch spot that was left
uncovered by the dropcloth?Today it’s
like ninety-five percent.

Whoops.More white paint on the carpet.At least I can rub it in.I’m going to have to find a piece of furniture
to cover all the gray primer that dripped.

Lowe’s really needs to
do combo deals on carpet replacement and paint.I’d be their best customer.

Wonder if painters use
gallons of wall paint to make art?Isn’t
that what Jackson Pollock did?I’m kind
of doing a Pollock in this room right now.

I’m so bad at this.If I was bartering a skill to trade for
painting, I’d have a hard time coming up with something.What am I good at that is equally as valuable
as painting?Folding clothes?

I’m sweating. At least
I’m getting some exercise.It makes me
feel better about skipping the gym this week to get this done.Of course, on a scale of one to ten, with one
being the most tortuous form of exercise and ten being the most fun, painting
is negative seventy-nine billion.

There are probably no
fat painters in the world.If there are,
what do they eat?Lard sandwiches,
probably.Or maybe they have thyroid
problems.

I remember when we used
to say that there were 6 billion people in the world.Then the seven billionth person was
born.So for years we were saying there
are six billion of us, six billion people in the world – when there were really
seven billion.That’s like saying something
that costs 19.99 is just 19 dollars.Keith (my husband) does that
all the time.“It’s only two hundred
dollars.”No.It isn’t.It’s two hundred and ninety nine dollars.That’s three hundred
dollars.And we have been seven billion
for a while now.

If I had seven billion
dollars I would never have to paint my walls.Ever.Neither would my kids.There wouldn’t even be the chance that we’d
have to paint walls in our lifetimes.Gwyneth Paltrow can’t say that.

Hell, if I had an
extra seven thousand dollars I wouldn’t
be painting my walls right now.

Friday, January 4, 2013

I’m kind of glad the week’s almost over and that I ran out
of time to go to the gym today; I am so worn out from trying to get back into
the swing of a normal exercise routine after the gross amount of back-sliding
that happened over the holidays in terms of my health and fitness due to all
the mashed potato and candy-eating and I don’t think I could have done one more
day.I really overdid it; my body hurts
in places that I don’t recall trying to recondition.

That one and a half hours of gym time this week really knocked
me out.I mean, even the scheduled nap
at the end of yoga felt extra strenuous the one day I did it.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

I love New Year’s.Eve, Day, whatever.I love the
idea of a new year representing a new start in life, a fresh perspective, a way
of doing things that is different than what you are leaving behind in the old
year.

Basically, I have the same attitude about New Year’s that
that prostitute on Forrest Gump declared, right before she and Lieutenant Dan
got it on in his seedy apartment in front of poor ol’ Forrest and his matching
prostitute who tasted like cigarettes.

"Don’t ’cha just love New
Years? You could start all over. Everybody gets a second chance."

The last day of the year descends in a rowdy pit of excitement
and crazy antics, kids hopped up on sugar and sleep-deprivation and adults on
booze and laughter and loud music, and everyone over-stimulated with parties
complete with funny hats and noisemakers, and Dick Clark/Ryan Seacrest and
various questionably talented entertainers on the TV.At once, the madness stops amazingly and is
replaced by reflection and wistfulness of the year just passed and a sliver of
optimism sparkling right over there.

Anything is possible.Second chances, a new beginning, the relief that things can be rebooted
for anyone.

Maybe you want to lose weight, exercise more, be nicer to
your husband, reconnect with an old friend, send more birthday cards, save
money, or take more time for yourself.

We’ve all been there, and there’s just something elevating
about wanting to live a little differently than the way you’ve done it the past
year.